Premiere

Performance

Program Notes

Hotel Palenque, 1973 was inspired by Robert
Smithson’s lecture/slide-show/fictional narrative/publication Hotel
Palenque. “During a trip to Mexico in 1969, Smithson photographed
an old, eccentrically constructed hotel, which was undergoing a cycle of simultaneous decay and
renovation. Smithson used these images in a lecture presented to
architecture students at the University of Utah in 1972, in which he humorously analyzed the
centerless, “de-architecturalized” site.” (Nancy Spector) My composition
attempts to extend Smithson’s fictional narrative by imagining the site of
the hotel the year after. Never having been to Mexico, let alone the hotel in question, the image —
and the sound of it — owes as much as to the place where I live (Tokyo) and the conditions under
which the piece happened to be written (during an extremely hot and humid summer), as to the actual
Hotel Palenque and what it may have been like in 1973. But then again, maybe one can only imagine
that which is unfamiliar.